Wilhelm Jordan as the Renewer of the Nibelungenlied
GA 161 — 28 March 1915, Dornach
This evening is to be dedicated to a poet who sought to intervene in certain secrets of poetic creation more meaningfully than he believed had been done by his time. We would like to draw attention to the reviver of the Song of the Nibelungs, to Wilhelm Jordan, who reached the height of his creative powers in the middle of the 19th century and at the beginning of the last third of the 19th century, a poet of whom it can truly be said that he has been little appreciated, especially in terms of his intentions, like so many similar artistic phenomena.
Wilhelm Jordan tried to use the material of the Nibelungenlied to simultaneously elevate the nature, I would say the essence, the art form of the Nibelungenlied to the level of contemporary poetry. I will then, when Dr. Steiner has presented some samples of Wilhelm Jordan's poetry, try to shed some light on the value and significance of this attempt to renew an old form of poetry from the point of view of our spiritual-scientific-artistic world view in a final reflection this evening. But before that, we want to let some samples pass before our souls, which should illustrate to us how Wilhelm Jordan strove to renew the old way of writing poetry from the inner power of language.
We know, of course, — for who should not be familiar with the actual content of the Nibelungen saga — how this Nibelungen saga expresses the nature, deeds, feelings and desires of people long ago. To what extent such human nature, human will and human deeds are expressed through the Song of the Nibelungs is what we will talk about later. But each of us knows that two figures are central to the Song of the Nibelungs: two female figures, Kriemhilde from Burgunderland and Brunhilde from Isenstein, from far across the sea. We know that Kriemhilde was to be married to Siegfried of the Lower Rhine, and we know that this marriage took place under difficult circumstances. We know that Kriemhilde's brother, Gunther, wants to woo Brunhilde, but that Brunhilde is very difficult to win, and Gunther is not the kind of person that Brunhilde would choose. But Gunther promises Siegfried of the Lower Rhine that he will give him Kriemhilde as a wife if Siegfried will help him, Gunther, in his courtship of Brunhilde. And Siegfried is – we will talk about this later – the strong hero who can overcome the almost invincible Brunhilde in battle. But Siegfried is also, one might say, a hero shrouded in occult forces, and this is how it comes about that when Gunther is to win Brunhilde in battle, Siegfried, having made her invisible by occult means, the magic hood, can assist him, and that it is actually Siegfried who can overcome Brunhilde. And Gunther, who is considered the conqueror because no one saw Siegfried, the real victor, at his side, can lead Brunhilde home to Worms.
And once again it is Gunther who has to fight with Brunhilde when she is already his wife. But again Siegfried has to stand up for him, and Siegfried takes the ring and belt from Brunhilde, while she has to believe that Gunther took them off her. But this is the reason why the most violent jealousy breaks out between the two, between Kriemhilde and Brunhilde. All this is so well known that I do not need to tell it at length. I would like to say that it is also clearly and distinctly presented to us in the Song of the Nibelungs, how, little by little, events make Brunhilde more and more jealous of Kriemhilde, and how this finds a kind of echo in the heart of Kriemhilde. We see the flames of rivalry between the two female personalities looming ominously. This is particularly evident when Kriemhilde, in possession of the ring and belt, Brunhilde's jewelry, shows them to Brunhilde and can prove from this possession that Siegfried, her husband, is the real conqueror of Brunhilde, and that she basically has a weakling
as her husband. The thought arises in Brunhilde that Siegfried must die because, in a sense, he has betrayed her. He should never have given the ring and belt to Kriemhilde, he should never have betrayed the secret that was only meant to be between him, Siegfried, and Brunhilde.
All this is also presented to us in a certain way in the Song of the Nibelungs. But if we follow all the motifs of the Nibelungenlied, something remains incomprehensible to us. This incomprehensible aspect becomes immediately understandable if we think of the Nibelungenlied as supplemented by what is no longer in the Nibelungenlied, but what old legends from even more remote times tell us was the time when the Nibelungenlied was written: if we pay attention to how is fundamentally the representative of an ancient being, a Valkyrie, how she is placed, as it were, this Brunhilde, as a later embodiment of an older powerful being, a Valkyrie presence, and how all this affects the present. As I said, it is not explicitly stated in the Song of the Nibelungs, but it is peculiar to the older saga.
If we take this from the older saga, we understand the demonic peculiarity of Brunhilde, but we also understand that in the events of the Song of the Nibelungs, something great and more significant is taking place than what can otherwise take place between personalities as personalities in the world. In a later incarnation, Brunhilde appears to us as having become, as it were, less than she was when she was a Valkyrie. Yet in her soul life she brings with her that which makes her a demonic being. But something similar appears in Siegfried. Here too we would like to say: let us see how Siegfried was embodied in ancient times, when he was still another human being, from whose being he brought something into the Siegfried incarnation. This enabled him to overcome Brünnhilde, who is also more than the Brünnhilde who lives in the earthly body. But this brings us face to face with Siegfried, as if in him that which makes a man a man, the power of the sun, was more developed in a previous incarnation than could be developed in a personality during the time in which Siegfried lived as Siegfried. Just as the power of the Earth Mother lived more in Brunhilde than she could live in a personality, in a female personality, during the time when Brunbilde appears as Brunhilde.
Thus the incarnated souls, the personalities, stand before us as mysterious beings. And so we understand that all this mystery, which ties in with many old legends and old forces that are not contained in the Song of the Nibelungs itself, is what Wilhelm Jordan wanted to bring out when he tried to depict what lives in the events, not in the Song of the Nibelungs itself, but in the events of the Song of the Nibelungs. and that a jealousy, which exists between Brunhilde with the Valkyrie soul and Kriemhilde, who is portrayed in the most eminent sense as the earthly woman of her time, does not break out in the same way as in the Nibelungenlied, but differently in Wilhelm Jordan, namely at the time when a festival, a solstice festival, is being celebrated for the time of which it treats: when Baldur, the god of the sun, is slain by Hödur, and when he is mourned by Nanna, his wife, from whom he has vanished from the realm of light, in order to descend, through the agency of death, which is caused by Hödur, into the realm of Hel. In Kriemhilde's soul itself, something like an inkling may arise: just as the festival play depicts how the sun god was snatched from the old goddess, so will I be snatched from the sun hero! She certainly does not call him the Sun Hero, but all this is in the subconscious of this enigmatic personality, which may have been brought up from incarnations in which there was more in the souls than in the later time, in which the souls became earthly human beings, which is also the time of the Song of the Nibelungs. We can understand, therefore, that the passions of both Brunhilde and Kriemhilde are inflamed when the play of the ancient sun-god is enacted before them. Then it happens that afterwards, during the bath, Kriemhilde reproaches Brunhilde with what she has to reproach her for, and Brunhilde decides to make Hagen, the grim one, to whom she confides, the murderer of Siegfried, who has betrayed her.
Thus does Wilhelm Jordan seek to revive what lived in ancient times; but he seeks also to revive it in such wise that in the revival may prevail that active weaving which was operative in poetry when the human soul stood more intimately with language, when this was still the case in our time; when the human soul still felt its surging and weaving and working and being, by expressing this surging and working and weaving in the words of the language. And the strangeness of it, as it is when a poet in turn brings this oneness with language to life, which was the peculiarity of the old verse, of the old art of poetry, we would like to bring before your soul with a few examples. But there is nothing in these old verses of the external synthesizing of the end rhyme, which carries the intellectual into the artistic form, which is always something that is externally architecturally built onto the language. What was poetry in the old days arose out of the organism of speech. And it sounds strange to today's man when real emphasis is placed on this poetry. And if one particularly emphasizes this inner interweaving with the weaving of the active soul, then it no longer seems natural to today's man. But Wilhelm Jordan took heart to do so: to bring out the inwardness of the word-initial rhyme in the alliteration, in our language, which is not really capable of alliteration. And when he recited his Nibelungenlied, he sought to bring this very old, peculiar essence of the verse, the alliteration in verses, to the present audience. From the sense of the speech, one could hear the alliteration:
Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery milk for men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams,
In the precincts of Worms, there might formerly
Not a grave or a rake touch the ground;
For there, in the middle of the wide May field,
lay, on a gentle hill, the sacred grove.
On its edge, looking towards the Rhine,
was now erected a viewing platform,
the stately stage for the Balderspiel.
There is no sense left today of this inner, innermost relationship to language:
Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous...
We now want to present and first hear what an old song triggered, as a sample of the renewal of alliteration, the old Balderlied.
... As the setting sun bathed the river of legend,
The emerald Rhine, in a blush of parting,
With garlands of molten gold,
Numerous boats glided through the shining waves near Worms
Up and down
And led the people home from the festival.
The regular rushing and pounding of the oars
Melodiously connected on board the boats
The clear tones of
Human throats also sounded in time: in several boats,
Which floated down close together,
the people sang the song of longing, which also drove Nanna down into the realm of night, when mistletoe murdered its mate.Listening at the window of the royal palace
Lay Krimhilde, waiting for her husband.
In anxious fear of bitterest reproach
Longed now for the distant beloved
Her caring soul full of longing and pain.
She felt guilty and sensed the fate
approaching step. So she heard, frightened
And gloomy, the funeral song.
While the euphony of the ancient melody
Resounded from the Rhine, her lips moved softly
And let the words of the song,
Which she had known since early childhood,
So hear her own ear:"O Balder, my beloved,
Where are you hidden?
Hear how Nanna
Is overcome with nameless anguish.Appear, you beautiful one,
And tend to Nanna,
Caressing and kissing,
Your loving mouth.Then resound the flames
The flaming fields,
From sighing voices
And dirges:The flower fades,
Fading, defoliated;
Summer de-energizes them
With scorching rays.At the funeral
of the divine spring
it decays and follows him
to fiery death.“O Balder, my beloved,
longing love,
unspeakable yearning
burns my chest.”Then from the depths resounds
The sound of the beloved:
“I left the world of light,
You seek me in vain.”O Balder, my lover,
O are you hidden?
Give news, like Nanna
You loving redeems!"“You do not call me back
From the depths of death.
What you love, you must leave
And only suffering is long.”"O Balder, my lover,
Darkness now covers you;
So take Nanna
Down into the night!"
The old clairvoyance dies, disappears; man stands alone, abandoned, and searches for what has disappeared, longs for it. Nanna, the world soul, seeks Baldur, the sun god, who has gone to Hel in Nifelland.
Now Hagen must gradually make the preparations for Siegfried's death. It is not possible to describe everything that Wilhelm Jordan has beautifully drawn from the saga and his own imagination to show how powerfully Hagen prepares Siegfried's death. It can only be pointed out that one of these preparations is the lighting of a tower. This glow of fire comes through the window into the room of Gunther. And now, in a magnificent way, Wilhelm Jordan evokes what is actually connected with something that I will also discuss later, if time permits: something of the very peculiar ancient feeling for nature is evoked for us, of which today's modern man no longer has any conception. In the glow of the fire, the conscience of the person who is still connected to what is happening outside is kindled. This person still has, so to speak, a glimpse of the dream-like appearance of the soul's release and can unite with the forces of nature outside. And the way fate befalls Siegfried, and how death is woven into his fate by the Norns, evokes from the soul of the person most concerned the ancient Norn song, the song of the elements of fate:
Had not the fire over there long since died out
And the smoke vanished? – See, it is wrested
From the black debris in a murky wisp.
Shadow-like, it rises in the shimmer of the stars
Like storm-driven dream figures.
On smoky wings over the Rhine
Three gray sisters,
giant figures, now stand resting
high in the air above the ruler's palace.
Spindle and bobbin, weaving ship and weft,
sharpening stone and scissors hold the hands.
And they spin and wind and stretch the threads
And weave and sharpen the scissors
And model song, so soul-crushing,
That, shaken by the shivers of death, the numb
Sleepers in the castle sob in their dreams;
For even if the ears slumber unsuspectingly,
Conscience watches in the listening heart: Envy has woven the nets
of the curse,
The house is desecrated,
Hell rules over it.
The snake crept up on it,
As the seed of sin continued to proliferate,
The greed for gold. The loving God of Light
Plucked from the tree
Full of fermenting poison
A purer bough;
And keen realization
Of the goal of the future
Preserved the miracle
On Hinderberg's heights. In vain! The tempter
Also corrupted this
With hunger for gold,
With hot desire.
Then the will became
A cramp for the crown,
The man's word perjury,
The loyalty, deceit. The pattern is marred,
And tomorrow the scissors
Of guilt will sever
The fabric of miracles.
Sons of the same sex kill each other,
And even the infant slurps
The murder in its milk. Then from the blood
Sprout the vines of revenge
And bring down, destroying
The trunk to the dust.
Now you must kill each other
In restless rage;
The daughter exterminates
The serpent race. The Norns' nets
Interwoven with curses
The hellhounds
This accursed house.
Its boastings and showings off
With shining fortunes
Now pay tenfold
The Nibelung's distress.
And as Siegfried draws ever closer to his death, it is that he too becomes interwoven with nature again – as I said, in ancient times this clairvoyance of nature could be felt quite differently in a tragically significant way – it is that Siegfried, through his clairvoyance, sees his destiny welling up in nature. But Siegfried also sees the workings of the destiny of his own soul intimately interwoven with the entire course of the evolution of the earth. And it is as if the destiny of the soul of the earth, in its weaving and surging, is condensed in his mind, which is becoming clairvoyant in that moment. As when, through the occurrence of a solar eclipse, which causes Siegfried to feel the disappearance of solar power, the disappearance of solar power for the earth as a whole simultaneously comes before his soul, in the coming times of the earth's winter, when the inner power of the sun is to die and what flows spiritually from the sun into people is also to disappear. Siegfried feels this rising in his own mind as he approaches his destiny. And from his contemplation of the solar eclipse, he gains an insight into the gradual dying away of the sun's blaze in the weaving and ruling of the cosmos and in the coexistence of this weaving and ruling of the cosmos with the earthly weaving and ruling. And so he sees, as it were, the embers of his own soul, of his own mind, dying away in the dying solar power. And an old song, learned in Iceland, across the sea, where Brunhilde is from, comes to his mind, who has suddenly become clairvoyantly knowledgeable. A foreboding weighs on his soul: it reflects his own destiny in the most intimate connection with his feeling for nature.
... The hero obeyed
And now hurried alone down towards the evening. And evening fell within him as well.
A gloomy presentiment of a sad end
Went round his sunny fate with shadows. But to brood over the dreadful words
Of the madwoman and to sift the meaning
Of the madness of the sick soul
forbidden to him: evening was falling
All around him, too. But high up in the sky
The sun was still shining brightly; not a single
He saw floating, as far as he could see. But this blue sky
Resembled that of steel. The birds fell silent,
They hid silently in the treetops,
And hid their heads in their colorful feathers.
Only the swallows still swarmed in anxious flocks,
And their twittering sounded like despair.
The mouse scurried out of its hiding place;
The marten stalked the sleepy birds
Like a secret murderer;
Ugly moths flew up and bats;
The cackling owl and the groaning owl
Rejoiced to hunt so early. It dawns darker, yet
All things remain wondrously distinct,
Yes, shadows and light are even more sharply distinguished.
But just in the shadow of the sheltering lime tree
At his feet, he grasps the mystery:
Where the quivering light through the gaps in the foliage
Reaches the lawn, it forms on the ground
Not little discs as usual, no, sharp crescents.
He looks up to the sky, and there it flares like a crescent moon,
Still too dazzling to look at.
He peers around, and behold, there
A blackish swamp reflects
The sun clearly in a crescent shape. Then the heart of the fearless hero was seized
A sorrowful presentiment of coming disaster,
But no longer for himself. As if to the soul of the earth,
His darkened spirit now expanded full of night thoughts.
The twilight of the gods,
The wrathful day of doom arose from the future,
And an ancient song, learned in Iceland,
was heard from the lips of the hero: There, too, is distress
And destruction threatens.
In the sky, too, I hear
Lights have already gone out
And the proudest stars
Are awaiting destruction.
Night will come, too,
That no tomorrow follows;
For the sun grows weak
In coming summers. Once there was a winter
That lasted endlessly,
That never thawed
The lurking winds
Never through the spring.
As if from eternal ice
the Alps now stare,
so the countries lay
burdened with glaciers;
Because the sun was sick
in past summers. And again there will be
such a winter,
Where terrible frosts
follow in the spring.
A haze darkens
the source of life
until it is barely recognizable
glowing like coal;
Because the sun is failing
around the summer solstice. Then a whale rolls
Through icy waters
And swings its tail
Swimming south.
In the freezing flood
The fins become entangled,
Its pulse freezes
On the palm-lined shore;
For the sun has grown weak,
And nowhere is summer. With such a song, Sigfrid wandered
Lonely towards the evening, until at last he
From afar, the prince's camp was seen,
Where, strangely illuminated by the setting sun,
The Burgundians appeared like ghosts and shadows,
Still waiting for salvation in the dawning grove
At the pathless foot of the rocks of Idha.
We can only come close to this material, which Wilhelm Jordan tried to renew in his own way in the last third of the 19th century, if we know that the perspective of spiritual science is actually necessary in order to gain a relationship to what is contained in this material, which is also so deep in terms of content. From the spiritual-scientific point of view, subject-matter and language belong together, and so today we shall attempt to point out something of the subject-matter and language of these things.
What memories of significant events were brought to the Nibelungen verses in medieval times had been forgotten in the following period, which was quite different from the earlier one in terms of spiritual content. What elevates us today when we immerse ourselves in the Song of the Nibelungs was, to a certain extent, not there for the people of the 16th and 17th centuries; nor was it there for the people of the first half of the 18th century, really not there. Before that it was there, before that it formed, when it was brought before the people by the reciters, as was the custom, the content of elevation to the greatness and meaning of the human being. But when Central Europe was flooded by foreign domination, it was the fate of intellectual life in this Central Europe that everything that had once constituted its greatness had to be forgotten. It was only by chance that the material for the Song of the Nibelungs had to be recovered from individual manuscripts. And many great treasures of the past, in which so much that is significant lives, have this peculiar fate, as was the case with the treasure of the Song of the Nibelungs and the Nibelung saga.
What actually appears to us in the stories of this Nibelungenlied? People come before us, and we immediately know, as we get to know them through the Nibelungenlied, that there is actually more to them than can find immediate expression, immediate revelation, in this earthly shell in which they fight out their life struggles and life worries. More lives in all these souls than the body can bring to external reality; and this applies to a high degree to Brunhilde, to a high degree to Siegfried and also in a certain way to Hagen; while we already see in Kriemhilde and Gunther how they are people who, through what their souls are, are more in line with their time.
In Brunhilde and Siegfried, beings are embodied that actually no longer fit into the time in which they live. Siegfried is still a solar hero, Brunhilde a Valkyrie, a mother of the world. That is why they are both related, and that is why Brunhilde, the Valkyrie, can only be overcome by Siegfried, the solar hero. Kriemhilde and Gunther are beings who fit more into the time in which they live, in that they have already lost the old clairvoyance. Brunhilde and Siegfried still have it to some extent, and so does Hagen to a certain degree, but Siegfried must live in this time, Siegfried must live out the essence of his soul in his time. The way he lives it out, this soul shows us for the spiritual scientific view: it was once in the body of an ancient initiate, an ancient human being in previous embodiments, who was deeply familiar with the peculiarities of the spiritual worlds. And when we let the Brunhilde soul work on us from a spiritual-scientific point of view, this Valkyrie soul, it shows us: what it encompasses is something of the soul-spiritual that in ancient times could still appear to people with their dream-like clairvoyant vision, but which in more recent times can only be seen by heroes when, led by the courage of a fighter, they enter through the gate of death into the realm of spirits, where souls like the Brunhilde soul as Valkyrie souls await them.
Now these people are placed in the world of physical earthly events. Therefore, what can only prepare itself for this tragic fate lies over these souls. Even in the courage and turmoil of battle, the suffering, tragedy, lament that permeates the entire Nibelungenlied prepares itself spiritually, for these souls carry something within them that can no longer fully be placed in their immediate present. One would like to say that in the subconscious memory of these souls something lives from past earthly greatness, in these souls much still lives from old Atlantean times: so great and powerful were these souls. How earthly events take place in such souls, what can take place there in terms of loyalty between such souls and of doom, that is precisely what the Song of the Nibelungs seeks to depict, as the older sagas so beautifully portrayed such personalities, such as Siegfried.
Let us assume that Siegfried was a soul in a previous incarnation, familiar with the weaving of the spiritual worlds, that he was tremendously immersed in the spiritual worlds and their weaving with the powers of his soul, his soul-life. And now he is born as Siegfried. Something of those forces emerges in his soul, which draws him to that with which he was once interwoven, which is now no longer there as dreamlike clairvoyance, which is now hidden in the depths of physical existence. He is driven to that which he can no longer see properly, at most in particularly poignant moments. There he is driven to dragons and enchanted personalities, and there that which he can no longer see is interwoven with the courage, the bellicosity that lives in his heart. And a cornea develops from the dragon's blood because he carries within him as strength that which he once had within him as the meaning of vision. There is infinite depth in this material, infinite significance. Above all, all memory is in it: yes, there was once a clairvoyant, a dreamlike-clairvoyant humanity, for whose souls lay open a part of the supersensible worlds, their workings and weavings. But this power of solar vision, this power of sun-vision, has sunk down. Baldur has sunk, and Nanna, the human soul, senses the tragedy of the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision. Let us place ourselves in the mood from which the Nibelungen material is woven, in the mourning over the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision, in the knowledge: Now it is present at most only in the willpower, this power of solar vision, transformed into the weaving of the willpower!
The hollowness and professorialism of the 19th century has managed to transform this deeply tragic mood of the sinking of the ancient power of solar vision for the human soul of a later time into the abstract parable of the descent of spring into Baldur, and the like, like all all these abstract, learned, complicated, perverted symbols that have been invented by the learned, the perverted, who have maltreated the great, the mighty that lies in the knowledge of the decline of the ancient, dream-like power of sun-vision from the human soul. We must see in Nanna the human soul mourning Baldur, who was connected with her earlier as the power of solar vision, and who now dwells below in the dark realm of Hel, since in man only the gold of the sense mind has remained, which he can only seek with the mind power bound to the brain and the powers of the earth, that is, of sense matter. Only when we understand the whole atmosphere that permeates the Nibelungen saga in this way do we really understand the living forces at work in it. Then we also understand how something in the events can be seen as an extension of what lived in ancient times and what only survived in a faint echo in the people of that time.
Thus we see how in ancient times that which arose in the human soul through the power of vision united with that which lived in the other human soul through the power of vision; but we also see how, in times when this can no longer be, the power of soul vision connects with soul vision, people no longer find each other, even though they seem destined for each other, because they have re-embodied soul powers, which were once powerful soul powers, but in a body that does not fully express these old soul vision powers. Siegfried cannot find Brunhilde. Siegfried woos Kriemhilde, who was actually born into the present time. And Gunther, who was born into the present time, woos Brunhilde, who actually carries a soul within her, equipped with the powers of the ancient time, the soul's power of solar vision. And so, in the time that prepares materialism, souls get mixed up. This is how their tragic destiny develops.
What has been passed down from the old, inspired, seer-inspired time to the newer, merely rational, sensual time is playing out in the destiny of mankind. And when we are once in a position to have brought up more from the depths of soul-spiritual science, then we will find infinite depths precisely in such material as the Nibelungen material is. What is alive in these wonderful old legends will one day be brought to light; today, I might say, only a few strokes can be used to hint at the deep content of the Nibelungen material. But a mind such as Wilhelm Jordan's had no clear consciousness of all that I have just spoken of, for in his time spiritual science did not yet exist. But he had an inkling of it, coming from the time of which I also hinted to you yesterday, when Ludwig Feuerbach, in the forties, although an opponent of all spirituality, conceived an eminently spiritual thought in order to combat it. The gods give everything, it is only a matter of how people are able to grasp it. But Wilhelm Jordan had really immersed himself in the surging and seething and weaving and streaming of his time. He had a presentiment in his profound immersion in all this, and he now sought to renew in his own way that which lives in the Song of the Nibelungs.
It was no longer as bad as in the 17th and early 18th centuries, when, in the era of burgeoning materialism, the Nibelungenlied, along with everything else of a spiritual nature, had been completely forgotten, when nobody knew anything about it and it was bound to happen that a profound Swiss, who became a professor at the Joachimsthaler Gymnasium in Berlin, Christoph Heinrich Müller, would first draw attention to the full extent and significance of the Nibelungen material. It was Müller who first published the first treasures from the manuscript of Hohenems in [Vorarlberg] - he found two manuscripts there - under the title “Kriemhildens Rache”. Once again, what had served to uplift countless souls for centuries had to be pulled out of obscurity. And when the Swiss miller, who was a professor in Berlin, pointed out the great significance of the Song of the Nibelungs, it was Frederick II, the pupil of Voltaire, who wrote to this Swiss miller:
Dear learned and trusted sir, You are far too favorable in your judgment of the poems from the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries that you helped print and that you consider useful for enriching the German language. In my opinion, they are not worth a shot of powder and do not deserve to be pulled out of the dust of obscurity. In my collection of books, at least, I would not tolerate such miserable stuff; I would throw it out. The copy sent to me may await its fate in the large library there. But it does not promise much demand; otherwise, your gracious king. Potsdam, February 22, 1784.
I don't know if it is still the case, but our friends in Zurich will know: for a long time this letter was kept under glass in the Zurich Central Library so that it could be seen when one came to this Zurich library. But, as I said, in the first half of the 19th century some people gradually began to realize the full greatness of the Nibelungen material. And Wilhelm Jordan now felt the need to awaken the time in which the Nibelungen saga could live; for this time was one in which people related to language in a completely different way than we do today. And anyone who felt that something unnatural lives in the peculiar alliteration of the language that Wilhelm Jordan was trying to recreate shows by that that he can no longer bring to life in himself that old intimate relationship to language where we still knew that something of the divine word lives in the working of language, where man still felt that what lived in his thoughts from the connection of things must also go out into language, into the weaving and living and working and being of language.
Of course, our time is one in which materialism has taken hold of everything, including our relationship to language. In ordinary speech, we no longer know what language was like, how it flowed out of the living life of the soul, where the soul was intimately interwoven with language. Wilhelm Jordan still had an inkling that the spiritual was connected with language. Today, language has become abstract; it consists only of signs for what is to be expressed. The spiritual no longer resonates. It is no longer a spilling forth of the inner life, of the breath of man, of the breathing of man. Just as the hand is a part of me, as I shape it into a gesture, so in the early days, in the weaving and living of the word, the speaker sensed something like a gesture, like a gesture of his air-man, of his elemental man within him. But for this to be the case, language had to be richer, richer than it can be today, when it has become a sign and the soul no longer feels the connection between sounds and thoughts.
Today we say quite thoughtlessly, quite naturally, “a brave hero”. If a medieval man were to resurrect in his body at that time, and he would hear us say “a brave hero,” he would not know how to contain himself with laughter, he would say: A brave hero? — What is that supposed to mean to me? — because he still has the feeling that “brave” should mean clumsy. He would say: A hippopotamus, you can call an elephant brave, but not a hero! And he would never have dared to call a hero great. Great and small were only sensual concepts for him. We call our heroes great because we no longer have any concept of what the word expresses, namely only the sensual. But these people did indeed have a richer treasure, a truly richer treasure for the way they wanted to describe a hero, for example. A hero was 'bold', that is, bold - roughly expressed in our language - and with 'bold', the medieval man still felt what was inside. Or a hero was 'strict', a strict hero. What would a modern man think of that? The medieval man would know that a strict hero had huge muscles. 'Strict' was the expression for the hero's form in relation to his muscles. A medieval person would also laugh if you said, “A hero is brave.” He would say, “Yes, but what do you actually mean by that?” A brave hero is one in whom courage takes over. A courageous hero is a person who is particularly passionate. You would never have said “a courageous hero.” But you see, language was much richer, infinitely richer, than it is today in terms of words. Language has lost many words because the inner relationship to language has been lost. Let us take just one example, a very obvious example – I would like to share this with you – let us assume that a person wanted to say: “The men were waiting for the horses” or “were waiting for the horses”. He could have said:
warun weros an wahtu wiggeo.
Now we have the alliteration. But if someone had wanted to say, for example, “The man was at home among the servants,” if he had wanted to say that, he would not have had any luck with the alliteration even if he had used this form for “men.” For this sentence: “The man was in his home among the servants,” one could say:
Segg was in his home undar gisindun.
So you could connect this “selda” as home with “segg”, which could also be used to express “the man”. Or you could say, for example: “Dietrich was the man's most expensive”:
Degano dechisto Diotrihhe.
So you had the option of finding several forms to express “man” and “men”. That has all been lost, and we have to translate all these sentences in a uniform manner with “man” and “men”. Our language has completely lost the inner relationship to thought, to expression.
Wilhelm Jordan has now tried to restore such a relationship; and he has done what he could. But of course he could no longer bring up what the old language had: an inner interweaving with the meaning of the living thought-being in the words. How satisfied someone is today if he can only say: “The man has a home” or “the man has a house”. Medieval man would not have said something that meant “house and home” in his language so simply. Or he would not have said lightly, this medieval man: “With my senses I perceive something,” but he wanted to divide what was perceived with the senses so that it appeared to him in a more concrete, more specific, more meaningful, more saturated way, as if he had said, for example, “hugi endi herta”. Both, you could say, mean “sense and meaning,” because the difference between hugi and herta is weakened. Time and again, you feel an infinite richness of content in this ancient language.
Now, Wilhelm Jordan at least wanted to salvage something of the inner life of the language. And so he experienced a struggle between his desire to do so and the fact that our modern language had become abstract. He wanted to save what was still there – and only in the German language – in terms of the possibility of saving these old intimacies in language. Today, people will naturally be tempted to read something like the lines I have read to you to themselves, so that what is written in the lines is only a linguistic sign for the meaning. The majority of people in Europe feel that language is nothing but a sign for meaning, and they will be satisfied when they hear:
Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams,
In the vicinity of Worms,... (read without emphasizing the alliteration).
Certainly, language is used as a sign. Even today there are languages in which many syllables are dropped because language has become nothing but a sign, because nothing is alive in what is spoken. Above all, we will never be able to penetrate to the true living principle of art if we think that language is only a sign, because that can only suffice for prose at best. Poetry demands that language be shaped inwardly, and not just mechanically through the end verse, but inwardly shaped, as a living organism is shaped, through alliteration or assonance. Just as mechanism relates to life, so does the end rhyme relate to alliteration.
Wilhelm Jordan still wanted to reflect this effect of language; he wanted to give language that which came from the old seer time. In the old seer times one could not have spoken as one does today in materialistic times, when one no longer has a feeling for the inner weaving of language. In the old seer times, one had the desire and yearning to really put the light that lives in the thought into the essence of the word. And Wilhelm Jordan had an inkling of this. In particular, I often heard his brother, with whom I was friends, read aloud in the style of Wilhelm Jordan, and there was a particular longing to emphasize the alliterative nature, to emphasize the artistic over the unartistic, merely in terms of meaning.
Where now Rhenish vines the world-famous
Fiery Milk for Men mix
From juices of the earth and sunbeams
In the vicinity of Worms...
I can imagine that today's materialistic rationalists consider this to be a gimmick. Since 1907, we have been working to find a form necessary for modern declamation to bring to the lecture that which should be resurrected from ancient times. The first attempt was not carried out, which we wanted to undertake at the time of the Munich Congress in 1907. But I think that the possible and the impossible in relation to the present language will have been brought before your souls in today's attempt. Because we can say nothing other than: No one can achieve the impossible; and our language has become so that it is impossible to bring up in its full sense all that was alive in the old Sun Seers' time, through alliteration, for example. And that he wanted to do it is certain – one can even say it was a mistake of Wilhelm Jordan's; it is a heroic attempt, but also in a sense a heroic mistake. But what follows from this? It follows that it is no longer possible to truly revive what in ancient times was alliteration, in ancient times that still had the direct resonance of dreamlike clairvoyance. Language has become material, has become abstract. But spiritual science will bring forth a new artistic creation, a creation with inner forms of meaning, in which, by directly grasping the spiritual, we also grasp the word. Such attempts have been made. Take the seventh picture, the picture of the spiritual realm in the 'Gate of Initiation' and many others, where the attempt has been made to enter into language by grasping the spiritual, where an attempt has been made to bring such art back into language, so that the spiritual expresses itself, resonates in the words. Only in the German language is it still halfway possible to express this.
Here too, we have an area today through which we see how it is predetermined in the course of human development to enliven the spiritual in such a way that it is strong, that this spiritual not only remains with the intellectual sense, but can again grasp the stronger power of the word. Then in speech there will be rhyming again and in rhyme again speech that has become the new rune. A rune is the direct interweaving of expression with the thing, so that the expression is not just a sign. Here again we have an area in which the necessity of the spiritual-scientific world view for our time expresses itself in a deep and also serious sense. Would that many could soon realize that in many fields we can observe how human life is withering if it is not fertilized by a new ray of spirituality. For that which lives among people as if in a physical aura, language itself, has become abstract, materialistic, intellectual; and by speaking, not just by thinking, we have become materialists. But what has already become straw in the word, so that we no longer feel the “tapsen” in “tapfer”, that must in turn gain soul, soul instead of mechanism. For language has become mechanism.
The spiritual-scientific current must also breathe soul into language. And this wrestling with language in order to breathe soul into it, we can feel it when we immerse ourselves in such artistic endeavour as was shown by an eminent man of world outlook, Wilhelm Jordan. But that falsification that is called the literary history of the 19th century will have to be rewritten altogether when people want to get a true idea of what actually happened. The names of poets that appear in literary histories will be completely different from those that have been appointed as great poets, while genuine, honest artistic endeavor, as shown by Wilhelm Jordan in the mid-19th century in the “Demiurgos” he published, has been trampled underfoot by literary court councilors like Karl Rudolf von Gottschall. Who knows today that Wilhelm Jordan endeavored to show in his Demiurgos how people live here on earth, and that this life on earth is actually a reflection of something that happens above ground, so that the person standing there is a sign of something that is happening in the supernatural at the same time! Who knows today that a personality such as Wilhelm Jordan, with such great and powerful problems, struggled in the dawn of modern times? But the sun of modern times, the sun of spiritual science, will awaken something quite different from the stream of artistic life than the forgeries are that are offered to us today in schools and outside of schools as literary history, in which the new materialistic soul only reflects itself and finds great things in which, as they say, it can lick its fingers because it finds it so similar to itself.
Let us feel the magnitude of the task of spiritual scientific thinking and spiritual scientific feeling. Let us feel it when we speak of straw instead of the living plant of the word, which has once sprouted and blossomed between souls that want to understand each other. Life, real life, will flow into the stream of existence when spirit from spiritual science in turn permeates people with the meaning of life.